The Whisperers
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* Yevgeny was tortured and then shot by Beria himself, who at that time was the Party boss in the Georgian capital. Ketevan was the prototype of the character of Ketevan Barateli in Tengis Abuladze’s film Repentance (1984).
*According to her memoirs, published in 1998, Okunevskaia had married Gorbatov in 1937 in the hope that, as a well-known writer and Pravda journalist, he might protect her from arrest (her father, who had been arrested as a tsarist officer in 1925, was rearrested with her grandmother and sent to a labour camp in 1937, while she herself was dropped from the film she had been shooting and could not find any other acting work). For the next ten years the couple lived the luxurious lifestyle of the Soviet elite. They were always to be seen at receptions in the Kremlin, where Tatiana’s beauty attracted the attentions of NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria. In 1947, she was raped repeatedly by Beria. The event became common knowledge in the Soviet leadership. In her memoirs Okunevskaia claims that Gorbatov did nothing to protect her. He had just been promoted to the Central Committee and did not want to rock the boat. Tatiana became wild and outspoken. She drank heavily and acted indiscretely at Kremlin receptions. Afraid of her arrest, Gorbatov pleaded with his wife to try to save herself by joining the Party. But she refused. To save himself, according to Okunevskaia, Gorbatov gave evidence about his wife’s activities to the authorities. Tatiana was arrested and sentenced to ten years in the Kolyma camps for espionage (she had often been abroad and was well known for her affairs with foreign men, including Josip Tito, the Yugoslav Prime Minister). Okunevskaia’s arrest was a cause of frequent arguments in the Simonov household. In her memoirs Okunevskaia is deeply hostile towards Simonov, depicting him, like Gorbatov, as a loathsome Party careerist. Recalling her first meeting with Simonov, at Peredelkino in 1937, when she claims he tried to force himself on her, she describes the writer as ‘the most unsympathetic [of all Gorbatov’s friends], coarse and blunt, lacking graciousness, dirty and unkempt’, a description radically at odds with the cultured and respectable figure described by others at the time (T. Okunevskaia, Tat’ianin den’ (Moscow, 1998), pp. 65–6).
*The Order was not made known to the Soviet public until 1988, when it was published as part of the policy of glasnost, or openness, although it had been distributed to all units of the Soviet armed forces in 1942.
*The Russian army fought in the Carpathian mountains in the First World War.
*In the Golovin family three of Nikolai’s four sons were killed in the fighting of 1941: Ivan (then aged thirty-four), Nikolai (twenty-eight) and Anatoly (twenty-one).
* Proportionately it is arguable that Poland suffered more, but in absolute numbers the Soviet loss of human life and property was much greater.
† The Soviet authorities took the view that a wounded veteran who had the capacity to work was not a war invalid. It encouraged wounded veterans to find employment – to toughen up and thus recuperate – and paid only a small invalidity pension to about 3 million veterans
(B. Fieseler, ‘The War Disabled in the Soviet Union 1945–64’, paper presented at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London, September 2006).
* ‘Little [Hans] Sachs’ (from Wagner’s opera The Mastersingers of Nuremburg).
* A reference to The Young Guard by Aleksandr Fadeyev, a semi-factual novel about an underground youth organization in occupied Ukraine during the Second World War, which won the Stalin Prize in 1946.
* That person (who is still alive) went on to become the head of the Department of Party History at Leningrad University.
* There is a legend about the victory parade in Moscow on 24 June 1945, when Zhukov led the columns of troops across Red Square riding on a white Arab stallion. It was said that Stalin had intended to lead the parade but that at the rehearsal he had been thrown by the stallion. The legend is untrue, but it suggests the popular desire for Stalin to be toppled by Zhukov.
* Voznesensky did not advocate a restoration of the mixed economy but he did favour lifting state controls on prices so that they would better reflect supply and demand. He also advocated an expansion of the cooperative sector, and more investment in consumer industries, such as textiles, both measures which had been important to the early success of the NEP.
* It has often been suggested that Zhdanov was a political moderate, a liberal reformer, who lost out to hardliners, such as Malenkov, in Stalin’s ruling clique, as relations with the West deteriorated in 1945–6. According to this view, the hardline cultural policies were in fact imposed by Zhdanov’s rivals in the Party leadership. But the archives show that Zhdanov had no independent political ideas, and that policy positions within the ruling clique were developed in response to various signals from Stalin, who used Zhdanov to impose on all the Soviet arts and sciences a rigid ideological conformity to the Party’s anti-Western stance.
* For the same reason Simonov defended the writer Vasily Grossman, whose play If We Are to Believe the Pythagoreans was savagely attacked in Pravda in September 1946. Simonov wrote to the paper’s editor, defending Grossman on the grounds that a writer who had spent ‘the whole war fighting at the front’ did not deserve to be criticized in the abusive language used by the critic, even if he had made ‘serious ideological errors’ (RGALI, f. 1814, op. 9, d. 1384, l. 2).
* Zaslavsky was probably the author of the infamous Pravda article of 1936 (‘Muddle Instead of Music’) denouncing Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. In 1929, Zaslavsky had denounced his own brother as a ‘Trotskyist’ to demonstrate his loyalty to the Party. On Fadeyev’s initiative, and with the agreement of Stalin, Zaslavsky and Ehrenburg were both removed from the list of members of the JAFC shortly before the arrest of its other members in December 1948 (RGALI, f. 2846, op. 1, dd. 75, 101, 187, 310, 311).
* The phrase ‘literary scum’ (literaturnye podonki) had been used to characterize Zoshchenko in the Central Committee’s decree of 14 August 1946.
* Aleksandr Borshchagovsky died in May 2006 at the age of ninety-four.
* Anti-Semitic Russian nationalists of the tsarist era.
* Natalia was not asserting her own Jewishness: nationality, or ethnic origin, was a required category in all official documents.
* Maltsev (Rovinsky) was in fact a Russian but he shared the name of a well-known Jewish editor called Rovinsky at Izvestiia (Stalin had probably confused the two). He changed his name from Rovinsky to Maltsev after an anti-Semitic reaction against one of his earlier novels.
* In the autumn of 1952, Stalin had replaced the Politburo with a larger Presidium of twenty-five members in preparation for a new purge of the Party leadership.
* One of Lev’s most important friendships within the party was with Andrei Starostin, one of the four famous Starostin brothers, all footballing stars with Spartak Moscow. Lev had known Starostin since the 1930s, when his younger brother Igor had played for the youth team of Moscow Dinamo (Igor Netto went on to become a stylish midfielder with Spartak Moscow, and from 1952, when Lev was in the Gulag, the captain of the Soviet national side). Lev was deeply influenced by Starostin’s ideas, which he recorded in a notebook. One idea, which Lev now sees as the ‘guiding principle’ of his whole life, was borrowed from Tolstoy: ‘Do what is necessary, and what you think you should, and whatever will be, will be.’
*She left the Party as soon as Tania and her brother Aleksei emigrated to the USA – at the height of the Kremlin’s campaign against Elena Bonner and her second husband Andrei Sakharov – in 1978. Elena Bonner had joined the Party in 1956. She stopped paying her Party dues after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but out of fear for the welfare of her grandchildren, Ruth Bonner secretly went on paying them for her until 1972 (interview with Elena Bonner, Boston, November 2006).
*This is not confirmed by Marianna’s cousin Katia Bronshtein (née German), who was eighteen at the time.
*Galina took her mother’s name.
*In 1989 she discovered that he had been shot in 1937.
*With the cert
ificate of rehabilitation the Turkins received information that Aleksandr had died in a labour camp a few weeks after his arrest in 1936. He was fifty-two.
*Smuggled out of the Soviet Union and first published in Italy in 1957, Doctor Zhivago became an international bestseller, and Pasternak was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, but under pressure from the Writers’ Union, and a storm of nationalist abuse against him in the Soviet press, he was forced to refuse the prize.
* Interviewed in Moscow in 2004, Masha Simonova did not know about the existence of this letter, nor about the sentiments which it expressed.
* Zhenia worked at Moskva from 1957 to 1969, when she was sacked for ‘grave ideological errors’ (she had published Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poetry).
* The one really notable exception is Viktor Nekrasov’s In the Trenches of Stalingrad (1946), a vivid re-creation of the ordinary soldiers’ war which avoids the usual clichés about the wise leadership of the Party. Perhaps surprisingly, it won the Stalin Prize in 1946.
† Four works of fiction in this category: Simonov’s The Living and the Dead; Nekrasov’s The Second Night (1960); Okudzhava’s Good Luck, Schoolboy (1961); and Vasil Bykau’s The Dead Feel No Pain (1965).
* In the last year of his life Simonov attempted to establish a special collection of soldiers’ memoirs at the Ministry of Defence archives in Podolsk, just outside Moscow, but high-ranking army leaders were opposed to the idea (‘O popytke K. Simonova sozdat’ arkhiv voennykh memuarov’, Otechestvennye arkhivy, 1993, no. 1, pp. 63–73).
* Thousands of such memoirs may be found in the archives of the Memorial Society, which was established in towns across the Soviet Union during the late 1980s to commemorate the victims of repression and record their memories. There are also rich collections of unpublished memoirs from this period in the Archive of the Moscow Historical-Literary Society (‘Vozvrashchenie’), established in 1989; and in the Andrei Sakharov Public Centre and Museum, opened in Moscow in 1996.
* This psychological inheritance can be handed down in various ways: in parents’ anxieties and phobias, in their over-protection of children, in the expectations with which they burden them, and even in the games they play with them. The Hungarian psychoanalyst Terez Virag, who specialized in the treatment of Holocaust survivors and their children, cites the case of a mother, for example, who lived through the siege of Leningrad as a child. The mother’s two-year-old daughter would not eat Father Christmas biscuits, and would cry in protest when she was given them. As a child herself, the mother had been traumatized by stories she was told of people killing children to eat them during the siege of Leningrad. According to Virag, the mother had passed on this trauma in the form of a bath-time game she played with her daughter in which she would take the infant’s foot in her mouth and say, ‘Now I will eat you’ (T. Virag, Children of Social Trauma: Hungarian Psychoanalytic Case Studies (London, 2000), p. 43).
* Aleksandr died in a climbing accident in 1991.
* It was only in the 1990s, when he did his own researches in the Penza archives, that Nikolai discovered a family secret his parents had kept from him: that they had owned a village tavern and a bakery – enough property by Soviet standards to make them members of the bourgeoisie.
* All the materials cited from the archives of Memorial were collected and organized by the research project connected to this book. Most of them are available online at http://www.orlandofiges.com, where further details of the project can be found.
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